Last
week there was an interesting discussion on the eMint newsgroup around
remote working. It was sparked by a post made by a Pinterest employee
advertising a new position for a community manager that required said
candidate to locate themselves at the company’s Holborn office. In this
day and age, the argument went, is it right that people have to
physically be somewhere when doing what is largely a digital role?

Anyway, the whole issue of flexible/non flexible working has been
covered pretty extensively, but what perhaps hasn’t been given as much
air time is the role of co-working spaces. These reasonably modern
inventions offer freelance and remote workers a physical location to go
to and work alongside other people in a similar situation.

A new study published recently via the University of Michigan‘s Ross School of Business set out to explore just how useful these facilities are.

“If you give people freedom but not a mechanism to interact with
each other, they’ll just be in their own little world doing their own
task,” said the researchers.

This was famously the argument made by Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer when
she cancelled all remote working at the company and demanded employees
come into the office.

“So Marissa Mayer was right, in a sense. Without interaction,
you’re going to have lower productivity and less collaboration. But I
think there’s a happy medium. There are solutions that don’t require
everyone to be in the office all the time.”

The paper goes on to suggest that co-working spaces are therefore
crucial, especially in an environment where other social clubs are
struggling to stay afloat. Therefore, they suggest, co-working spaces
can help fill that space.

Of course, that serves a very different need to that offered by
physical location within an office. It’s hard to imagine after all,
that Marissa Mayer wanted Yahoos at the office so they could enjoy a
better social life. She wanted them there under the belief that doing
so allowed better collaboration between employees. Attending a
co-worker space alongside people not directly connected to your employer
therefore offers only a fuzzy likelihood of any collaborative benefits.

Such spaces also undersell the supposed connectivity afforded to us
by the large number of enterprise social networking tools. After all,
there is no real excuse to be disconnected from peers, be they inside or
outside of our official employer, even if that is just digitally.